


Dancing in the Midnight Garden

by Fionn_Sgeul



Series: Midnight Garden [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Alternate introduction of Gwen to Torchwood, BAMF Gwen Cooper, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Gwen Cooper and Gwyneth the Maid are the same person, Gwen is older and wiser and may have gone slightly off her rocker at some point, Gwen isn't human, Haunted garden gnomes, Humour, Pre-Season/Series 01, world building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-16 04:15:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7251712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fionn_Sgeul/pseuds/Fionn_Sgeul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Gwyneth the Maid and Gwen Cooper are the same person, Jack meets someone else whose life was completely turned around by the Doctor, and Torchwood is invaded by garden gnomes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. What the Hell Is Torchwood?

**Author's Note:**

> This idea came to me when I was re-watching series one of Doctor Who and saw Eve Myles playing Gwyneth the Maid in "The Unquiet Dead." And I thought, "What if Gwyneth WAS Gwen?" And my imagination spiralled out of control from there. This is in danger of turning into a whole series.

Gwen stood atop a tall building, looking down at her old city and breathing in its smoky scent, the wind whipping her hair off her face. So much had changed in the hundred and fifty or so years since she'd left Cardiff. She'd been back a few times, but still, she hardly recognised the place. It was still home, though, and now she was back to stay.

"It's been a long time," she murmured to the wind. "Time we got reacquainted."

And with a thrill of excitement, she jumped.

She spent two weeks exploring every foot of the city, relearning its roadmap and buildings. She slept anywhere she could hide her hammock amongst trees, or sometimes she tucked herself up on rooftops. She stole her food from supermarkets, there being no wild game besides pigeons and precious few edible plants outside gardens. And every day, she checked the Rift.

The Rift was what had brought Gwen back to the city of Cardiff, rather than to one of the nearby wooded areas her kind preferred. She intended to keep an eye on it, maybe even appoint herself its gatekeeper — something that would give her life a purpose. And defending her home from invaders seemed a fine purpose.

She wasn't above dealing with local trouble as well, though, if it crossed her path, and so also spent time poking about the criminal classes. It was from one of these people that she stole herself a police scanner. It seemed a useful thing to have, if she was to be keeping an eye out for trouble, and it would definitely be doing the world more good in her hands than those of the smelly little delinquent she'd stolen it from, even if she never turned the thing on.

Of course, then she was confronted with the problem that electronic things need to be kept dry, and Wales isn't exactly known for its sunny, clement weather. She buried the scanner deep in her tough, waterproof, canvas rucksack and wished for the first time in a long while that she could go somewhere indoors.

A base would be so useful, she thought — a place where she could set up her equipment and keep supplies. And _be dry._ Gwen, being what she was, wasn't bothered by cold, but she'd never liked being wet. She wasn't prepared to give up her wilderness for dryness, but it would be nice to have a place to go shelter when the weather got foul.

It was as she was thinking this on a wet and windy night, sheltering on somebody's back porch with the scanner on in her lap, that she heard the report. Deceased individual, male, what looked like some sort of bite-marks on the neck.

Well. That was odd. Maybe her kind of odd. Worth looking into, at any rate. She committed the address to memory, pulled her hood up over her head, and took off into the night.

 

***

Being able to make yourself invisible was the best power ever, in Gwen's opinion. Well, technically, she wasn't _totally_ invisible. Being totally invisible had the really inconvenient side-effect that it made you blind, as bending light so it didn't reflect off you also prevented it getting into your eyes. Gwen still remembered her friend Joss trying to teach her how to work around that, how fiddly and difficult it had been, and the tantrums of frustration she had thrown. She was good at it now, though — at leaving two tiny little windows in her shield so she could peer out, leaving the only visible part of her a pair of disembodied, floating eyes. Mortals hardly ever noticed them, and if they did, all she had to do was shut them, and whoever had spotted them would dismiss it as a trick of the light.

Mortals were ever so good at explaining strange things away as their imagination, or an illusion.

So Gwen stood pressed up against the wall of the alley, ninety-eight per cent invisible and happily in the rain-shadow of the building above her, and she watched the crime scene.

The man lay spread-eagled on the cobble stones, his face pale as milk. There was a bloody hole in his throat, but no blood on the ground around him and hardly a drop on his pale shirt. Definitely odd.

Police officers stood guard at either end of the alley — she'd had a job squeezing past the one behind her — and crime scene investigators in cover-alls were circling the body and photographing it. Each bright flash made Gwen wince and squint. She wondered how bloody long it was going to be until she got a chance for a closer look at the dead man.

A commotion arose at the far end of the alley. Four people in civilian clothing came barging past the police, the leader — a man in long, military-looking coat — flashing some sort of badge or something at them.

"Hell," muttered the forensics guy nearest Gwen. "It's bloody Torchwood."

"What are you complaining about?" another muttered back to him. "Let 'em have the weird stuff, I say. I sure as hell don't want it."

The forensics team allowed themselves to be chased off, and this second, much less professional looking group took over the investigation.

Gwen didn't know what the hell to make of them.

"Why does it always have to happen when it rains?" complained the smaller of the two men on the team as he crouched down next to the body.

"This is Wales," said one of the two women wryly. "It always rains."

Gwen felt an automatic defensive response at her country being insulted by an English voice, but reminded herself that she'd been bitterly thinking much the same thing not half an hour ago.

"Initial thoughts, Owen?" said the man in the long coat, his voice American. Gwen took a better look at the coat and thought that it looked old-fashioned. She remembered men dressing like that … in the Second World War, maybe? It felt odd.

Owen didn't look up from his examination. "Well, he has a hole in his throat that doesn't seem to have bled, even though it hit major arteries, and that's weird. Even if the body had been moved, there would be some on his clothes. Which makes me wonder if someone or something decided to bite a hole in his neck after he was already dead. And it's definitely a bite," he added, shining a light on it. "I can see the teeth marks."

"But animals don't go ripping throats out unless they're trying to kill," said the other woman. Her face was Asian — Japanese, Gwen thought — but her voice was English. "Why go for the jugular of a dead man?"

"Well, exactly," said Owen, opening the man's shirt. "No sign of trauma to the torso … or the head." He sniffed the dead man's mouth and nose and shone a light into his blank, staring eyes. "And no outward signs of poison or suffocation, but I'll have to get him up on the slab to be sure."

"What if the neck injury did kill him?" asked the leader in a low voice.

Owen straightened up. "Then I really do have to wonder where all the blood went. Come on, let's finish up and get out of this bloody rain."

They started going over the alleyway with lights and some sort of scanners. Gwen's heart started to pound and she edged backward. There wasn't a lot of room to manoeuvre; she was in danger of being bumped into. And though her invisibility trick worked on the human eye, she wasn't at all sure that it would fool these electronic gizmos.

Fortunately, the police guards were gone, so there was nothing to block her tip-toeing as quietly as she could out of the alley. And not a moment too soon — the Asian woman was coming her way, scanner in hand. The woman stopped suddenly and started to say something, but cut herself off, frowning at her equipment.

The American came striding over. "Got something, Tosh?"

"I thought I did, just for a split-second," said Tosh. "But it's gone now. Must have been a faulty reading." She finished her sweep and turned back, dismissing the incident, but the leader stayed for long moment, staring into the darkness with wary, suspicious eyes. Gwen held her breath until he turned at a call from one of the others.

She sighed in relief. _Well,_ she thought. _They might not look professional, but I've a nasty feeling their gadgets might pick me up._ She'd better be careful, she decided. These people, this 'Torchwood,' were the ones who dealt with 'weird' stuff. And under that heading, Gwen definitely qualified.

That wasn't going to stop her from following them, though.

 

***

Gwen tore across the rooftops of the city centre, following the black SUV below. She leapt from building to building, releasing a burst of power to boost her jumps, and another to soften her landings. She was very nearly flying, pushing herself along with magic energy, her legs barely keeping up beneath her. She considered actually taking to the air when the SUV got ahead of her, but flying was exhausting. She couldn't keep it up for more than a few blocks, and she had no idea how far these Torchwood people were going. Running and jumping like this was much less of a strain.

In the end, the SUV led her to Cardiff Bay, near Roald Dahl Plass, where it ducked into a little out-of-the-way parking garage. Gwen followed it in and watched as the Torchwood team piled out of the car and pulled the body out of the back on a gurney, all the while sniping and bantering at each other. They wheeled the corpse around the car and over to a door. The American — 'Jack,' she heard one of the others call him — held the door open while Owen pushed the gurney through. Gwen looked for an opportunity to slip in after them, but she didn't get one. The rest of the team seemed oblivious, but the leader ran sharp eyes over the garage. Gwen had no doubt that if that door moved by itself for even an instant, he would notice.

Damn.

Well, she thought, as least the parking garage was dry. It would do as a place to crash for the remainder of the night.

She found a corner screened from view from the door and the entrance by another big, black SUV with 'TORCHWOOD' emblazoned on the side. Pulling her thick, down sleeping bag out of her rucksack, she settled herself on the rock-hard ground, looking up at the title on the SUV and wondering what kind of secret, special-ops organisation put their name and logo on the side of all their vehicles.

Thus far, Torchwood was giving the impression of being more than a little weird themselves.

 

***

Gwen's night wasn't the most restful. She was disturbed first by the employees leaving to go home at something like one in the morning, forcing her to hastily make herself and her sleeping bag invisible. Then a couple of cats decided to have some massive, yowling fight right outside the garage, and it went on until she yowled back at them. Cats know a pissed-off supernatural entity when they hear one, and the two lost no time scarpering the hell out of there. Then she got a few more hours before the Torchwood employees were coming back in again — way too damn early considering the hour they'd gone home, in Gwen's opinion. She'd hoped to have more time to poke around.

Oh well, she could still poke around; she'd just have to be careful. And invisible. There was no one development in human history that Gwen despised more than CCTV cameras.

She slipped out of the garage and back to the surface. Working out exactly where Torchwood was took a while. The best she could figure was that it must be mostly underground, maybe under the Wales Millennium Centre. She circled it, munching on an apple from her bag for breakfast and composing a mental map of camera locations and spots they couldn't see. Spots where a person might appear or disappear without being recorded.

Then she had a lucky break. The American in the long coat, Jack, came striding out of the tourist information office by the waterfront. Gwen abandoned her investigation to follow him. He hurried off down the street, Gwen dashing in his wake. She gritted her teeth as she ducked and dodged to avoid knocking into pedestrians. She hated being invisible in crowds. The danger of bumping into someone was too great.

Jack turned off the main street, down an alley between two shops, and Gwen followed. He disappeared around one corner, another. She tried to catch up without her footsteps making enough noise to attract his attention. Damn it, where had he gon—

WHAM.

Something crashed into Gwen, knocking her flat with a startled yelp. It came down on top of her, forcing the air out of her lungs. Teeth — there were teeth right in front of her, and growling. It lunged for her.

Acting entirely on instinct, Gwen released a charge of electricity the size of a small lightning bolt. The creature jerked, spasmed, and rolled off her. She staggered to her feet, gasping, and dimly noted that she'd become visible at some point.

Running footsteps came toward her, and Jack skidded around the corner, gun in hand. He assessed the scene at a glance, grabbed Gwen by the arm and pulled her gently away. "You all right, ma'am?"

"That thing attacked me!" she said in a high-pitched, slightly panicked voice that wasn't entirely faked.

"And you defended yourself, looks like," he replied, holding his gun on the creature as he gave her an appreciative once-over and a very charming grin.

"I take self-defence classes," she muttered on autopilot. It was her automatic response whenever someone caught her having used her powers to defend herself. "What _is_ that thing?"

It was basically humanoid, but its face … hairless, distorted, with small eyes, not much nose or ears to speak of, and huge teeth.

"It's a Weevil," said Jack. "Well, we call them Weevils. Don't actually know their real name; they're not too good at communicating. We've got a couple hundred of them living in the sewers of Cardiff, feeding off the … well, it's the sewers. You can guess. Usually they keep to themselves, but every now and then one goes rogue or gets lost and ends up on the surface. They don't eat people or anything like that, but they will attack out of fear, especially if they feel cornered. What did you do to it?" he asked, fascinated.

Gwen went with the most plausible-sounding thing that popped into her head. "Knocked it down and kicked it in the head. I was frightened," she added apologetically, because kicking a scared creature while it was down seemed a bit cruel.

Jack patted her shoulder. "I'm sure you were. You did well." Then he touched some electronic gizmo on his ear — Bluetooth? Was that what those things were called? Gwen found it hard to keep track… — and started speaking to whoever was on the other end of it. "Weevil is down. Civilian woman took it out, if you can believe it. Yeah, she is. You got a read on my position?"

 _Civilian woman,_ thought Gwen, unable to keep the corner of her mouth from twitching up. _Hah. Shows what you know._

Jack looked back at her. "My team are on their way to pick it up, but we better keep an eye on it in the meantime. Once they get here, though, why don't I take you out for coffee? Make up for your little brush with death." There was that charming grin again.

Well. Gwen wasn't about to pass up an opportunity to get information out of him. "Sure. I don't have anywhere I need to be."

He winked at her and then looked back down at the so-called Weevil and poked it with his toe. "Damn, you must have kicked it hard. It's out cold."

"These boots are made for kickin'," joked Gwen in her best American accent (not that good), sticking out a foot to show him her tough, hard-wearing leather boots.

He threw back his head and laughed. "They certainly are. I'm Captain Jack Harkness, by the way." He held out a hand.

Gwen took it. "Gwen Cooper." She'd run through all the Welsh surnames in the book — or all the ones that she liked, anyway — a little while ago, and had started using some English ones. She kept her first name the same as much as she could, though.

"Nice to meet you, Gwen Cooper," said Jack Harkness, grinning.

 

***

Two members of Jack's team — Owen and the woman whose name she didn't know — soon arrived. Jack helped them put a bag over the Weevil's head and bundle it into the back of one of their SUVs. Both newcomers gave Gwen a once-over.

"Gwen, these are Owen and Suzie," said Jack.

"You took that thing down by yourself, without a weapon?" said Suzie appreciatively. "Well done."

Gwen shrugged and smiled with the best embarrassment she could fake. "Self-defense classes turned out to be good for something after all."

"I'm just going to take Gwen out for coffee," said Jack, and Gwen noticed that neither of his colleagues looked the least bit surprised. Did the man ask out every pretty woman he came across, even when he was working?

The café was nice, and Gwen was treated to some fancy concoction with a pile of whipped cream on top. She sniffed it with appreciation. She liked coffee, but rarely got the chance to have any.

They selected a table in a quiet corner, next a window with sunlight spilling through it. Gwen opened her questioning. "So how long has Cardiff had these Weevils living in the sewers?" she asked. "I mean, is that a recent thing?"

He shrugged. "Twenty years, maybe."

"Are they … alien?" she asked. "I really hope so, because if some sick bastard has been doing genetic experiments, I might have to be very cross."

Jack laughed. "Yeah, they're alien all right. A small population ended up here by accident, and they started breeding. It must be a good environment for them down there, because they're flourishing."

"And what about you, then?" she asked, sipping her coffee and watching him. "The side of your car said 'Torchwood.'"

"Yup," he agreed brightly, leaning back in his seat. "We're the Torchwood Institute, a secret organisation laid down in 1879 by Her Majesty Queen Victoria to protect the United Kingdom from extraterrestrial threats."

Gwen stared at him, turning that over in her mind. "You have the name and logo of your organisation painted on the sides of your vehicles. And you're sitting in a café, telling a complete stranger about what you do." She paused. "You have got to be the _least_ subtle special-ops government agency I've ever heard of. And that includes the American ones."

"Ooh, ouch," said Jack, not looking at all put out. "I'll admit, you may have a point about the SUVs. But me telling you about it doesn't count; you won't remember it."

Gwen went very still, her eyes sharp. Though Jack Harkness remained oblivious, he was now in approximately the same amount of danger as if he were shut in a small room with a live rattlesnake. He was fine so long as he didn't give it a reason. "And why wouldn't I?" she asked mildly.

He grinned and pointed at her coffee. She looked down at it and then slowly back up at him. The danger level rose from Small-Room-with-Rattlesnake to Medium-Room-with-Wild-Tiger. "Have you poisoned me?"

"Don't be so dramatic," he said, still all charming smiles. "It's an amnesia pill. My own recipe, with a touch of denial and a dash of retcon. When you wake up later today, you'll have forgotten everything about Torchwood. Worse still, you'll have forgotten me." He looked sad, then shrugged. "Which is kinda tragic."

Gwen sucked in a deep breath. She turned her attention inward and threw her immune system into overdrive. She could feel the agent in her, trying to interfere with the working of her brain, and she set up defenses. Then she gave Jack Harkness an accusing glare. "I was enjoying that coffee, and you've completely ruined it for me now."

He looked honestly apologetic. "Sorry. But it's policy. Can't have ordinary people knowing what's out there — they'd panic."

"And what," she asked acidly, stunned by the _gall_ of this man, "qualifies you to decide who can and can't handle that information? And what makes you so sure that it'll even _work,_ and it won't give me brain damage or something?"

He waved off her concerns. "We've used it on hundreds of people — you'll be fine. And I tested it on myself first. Made it damned hard to keep track of what I was doing, though, 'cause I kept forgetting everything about the drug. Had to make sure to write everything down." He chuckled.

"Everyone is different," said Gwen in a sharp, hard voice. "Haven't you ever seen those medical warnings? One in a thousand people might have some god-awful reaction to this drug, or might not be affected at all? You should _never_ make _assumptions_." She dumped the remainder of her coffee over his head and stormed out of the café.


	2. Never Make Assumptions

Tiredness was already tugging at Gwen's eyes as she moved away from the café. Her body was fighting the drug, but it was going to be quite a battle. She needed to find a safe place to crash — and retrieve her rucksack, she realised. She'd stashed it in a CCTV dead spot earlier that morning. She quickened her pace as she headed back there. The drug was dragging her down, and she was sure her movements were being tracked.

She ducked into the little nook where her bag was tucked out of sight, behind a skip. A quick glance around assured her she was alone, and that she hadn't missed seeing any cameras. She vanished.

A rooftop — a rooftop would be the safest place right now. She boosted a jump up onto a fire escape, but the energy came sluggishly. She climbed most of the way up the escape by physical power alone, then dared to try one more jump up onto the roof. She stumbled and fell on the landing.

She breathed a shaky breath, then forced herself to her feet and selected the most out-of-the-way corner to duck down and curl up. She used her rucksack as a pillow and shut her eyes, focussing all her energies on keeping her mind and memories intact.

***

Jack Harkness returned to the Hub with the aroma of coffee wafting around him and a brown stain spattered over his coat.

"What happened to you?" asked Suzie. 

"Gwen Cooper didn't appreciate being retconned," he replied. "Did you follow her home?" he asked Tosh, who was at her computer.

"I'm afraid not. We lost her in an alleyway not far from here. She must have either gone into a building or up a fire escape. But none of the buildings on the alleyway are residences."

Jack paused in the act of giving Ianto his coffee-stained coat. "Huh. Odd. Do we know who she is?"

Tosh shrugged. "I've found a number of Gwen Coopers of about the right age, but so far no pictures that match. Documentation is thin on the ground, though, so one of them could be her."

"Huh," said Jack again, running fingers through his sticky hair with a grimace. A shower was a must. Pity there was no one to join him. "Keep looking. I've never met anyone who dealt with aliens and Torchwood bursting into their lives with that much aplomb. And _gorgeous_ — phwoo! I was tempted to recruit her on the spot."

"I don't think recruitment decisions should be made with one's genitalia, sir," said Ianto, examining the damage to the coat.

Jack sighed. "No, I guess not. Shame. Owen!" He clapped his hands as Owen emerged from the autopsy room. "What have you got?"

"The body was almost completely exsanguinated," said Owen, leaning against Tosh's desk. "Barely a drop left in him. Something bit a hole in his jugular — something with a fairly human-shaped mouth, though much more serious teeth — and drained the blood out of him. And his heart would have had to still be beating for that to work, which makes it more than weird that he didn't struggle."

"Could he have been drugged?" asked Tosh.

Owen shrugged. "I didn't find any signs in his system, though that doesn't necessarily rule out some weird alien mumbo-jumbo."

"So we're dealing with a vampire?" asked Suzie dryly. She turned to Jack. " _Please_ tell me they don't sparkle."

Jack snorted and grinned. "No, no sexy, sparkling vampires here, more's the pity. It sounds to me like what we've got here is some sort of Plasmavore. There are several different species who feed primarily on blood, though, so we'll need more information to nail it down — especially since one species are shapeshifters."

"Great, that's all we need," grumbled Owen. "Shapeshifting vampires. And I bet they come out during the day, too."

"The better to see you, my dear," said Jack in a mock growl.

"That's the Big Bad Wolf," corrected Tosh. Then her computer threw up an alert. She leaned in to look. "We've got another body, down at the Bay. Throat injury."

Jack sighed. "You three go on ahead. I've got to get the coffee out of my hair and find a backup coat. Can't go to a crime scene looking like I just left a bad date."

***

Gwen woke mid-afternoon, her eyes full of gritty rime and her head full of fog. She wiped her eyes and squinted up at the position of the sun. What was she doing sleeping in the middle of the day in a place this exposed? Why did she feel like she'd eaten a bag of cotton wool, and stuffed her head with it for good measure? She shouldn't be here — she'd been investigating … something.

Her insides wobbled with anxiety. Why couldn't she remember what she'd been doing?

Green. She needed green, nature, her natural habitat. She'd be able to think more clearly there. She scrambled to her feet and threw her bag over her shoulder. Her legs felt a little unsteady beneath her, so she paced back and forth until they firmed up. Her power, on the other hand, leapt to her command like there was nothing wrong. She took off running, vanished herself and leapt across and up one story to the next building. It was a big jump, but she landed with a smooth roll and dashed for the next one.

The rush of air around her and the thrill of wild movement washed away her panic. She loved doing this. It was even better than running through the forest and leaping fallen logs. If only the mortals would fill their cities with plants and trees, then everything would be perfect. And maybe, with enough foliage about, she could even dare to drop her invisibility in daylight. Jumping always felt better when she didn't have to keep one part of her mind on her shield. Like last night, when she'd run so fast … why had she been running? Fleeing, chasing, or just after the thrill of it? 

She couldn't remember … she couldn't remember.

She leapt to the next building — lower now that she was getting further away from the city centre — landed smoothly in a crouch, and whirled towards the next one.

Something caught her eye. A rumpled heap of fabric — an abandoned bag? Up here? No, not a bag … those were clothes. That was a person. Drunk? Passed out? But on a _rooftop_? In a _suit_?

Then the smell caught her nose, and she knew. She buried her mouth and nose in the sleeve of her jacket and had to force herself to go closer.

Ugh, the smell — the cloying, sickly, _awful_ smell. She hated that smell. But she had to see.

It was a man — business suit, grey hair, mouth gaping open in the silent scream of the dead, the jaw muscles completely slack. The skin was yellowish and a little shrivelled, and there was gaping hole torn in the throat. What little blood there was had fully congealed and turned brownish. Flies buzzed and landed in the wound.

Gwen managed not to vomit, but it was a near thing. She leaned over the edge of the building, gasping and asking Mother Nature why death had to be so gross.

 _Another one,_ she thought. _Just like … just like…_

Just like the man last night. Just like the man lying in the alley, whose strange death had attracted equally strange investigators. Torchwood. The rest of the night came rushing back. The earlier events of that day came a little more slowly, but she managed to piece them together.

Bastards. How dare they drug her, drug _anyone_ who came across them? What gave them the right to tamper with people's very minds and memories? How _dare_ they?

Her spiralling, angry thoughts were interrupted by the return of her earlier realisation. Another one. Just like the first, except…

The image of the body behind her was burned into her mind so clearly it might have been a photograph. She closed her eyes and focussed on that rather than turn back to the real thing. The hole in the throat was larger with more ragged edges. Torn rather than bitten. And this body … it had been here a while. This one had died first — about three days ago, Gwen estimated from her previous experience of corpses. And it had been baking in the summer sun for two out of those three.

She swallowed. She couldn't just leave the body here. Who knew how long it might be before it was discovered? And she didn't want some other poor, unsuspecting sod to come across what she just had. No, much as it pained her, the best thing to do would be to tell Torchwood.

She scowled at the mere thought of them. Like hell did she want to help those arrogant little berks, but… A slow smile spread over her face. She could help and torment them at the same time — lead them in circles, teach them that they weren't running the show after all.

This promised to be fun.

***

Ianto had cleaned the retcon-laced coffee out of Jack's coat and hung it up to dry, thinking it ironic that when the man finally got a drink dumped over his head, it was for doing his job rather than by being his usual, outrageously flirtatious self. Though flirtation must have been involved at some point. Jack seemed incapable of turning it off, particularly where Ianto himself was concerned. And Ianto really wasn't sure what he felt about that.

He was still puzzling on it, sitting at his desk in the little room off the Tourist Office, when the chime on the front door jingled. He poked his head through the hanging beads in the doorway to see a young woman come in — pretty and black-haired with big eyes. She caught his eye and smiled at him.

"Can I help you, ma'am?" he asked.

"I hope so." She came over to the desk and held out a folded piece of paper. "I need to get this to Captain Jack Harkness." 

Ianto looked at her sharply. He shook the page open and scanned it in a moment.

_Never make assumptions._

_There's a body on the roof of the building at the corner of Charles Street and Queen Street. Throat ripped out. Looks and smells like it's been there about three days. I don't want anyone else stumbling across him like I did — I would have lost my lunch if I'd had any to lose, which I didn't because SOMEBODY poisoned my COFFEE._

_Don't think I'm forgetting about the coffee thing._

_Sincerely,  
Gwen Cooper_

Ianto's mouth dropped open. He looked up, but the woman had gone — there she was, just disappearing out the door. "Ma'am!" cried Ianto, jumping to his feet. He gave chase, bursting out the door only to slow to a stop. He turned in a full circle.

The Plass outside the Tourist Office was deserted. There were people wandering further away, but no black-haired woman heading away from him. No Gwen Cooper.

Still turning in a slow circle, as if he could have somehow missed her, Ianto activated his comm. "Jack? Are you there?"

Jack's voice spoke into his ear. "Ianto? What's up?"

"I just had a visit from Gwen Cooper. She gave me a note for you and then left. I tried to follow her, but she disappeared."

There was a long moment of silence, because Gwen Cooper ought to have forgotten all about Torchwood by now. And even if she hadn't, she should not have known where to go to get a message to Jack — should not have known anything about Ianto or the Tourist Office. When Jack spoke again, he sounded a lot more serious. "What does it say?"

Ianto read it out to him. "What does she mean, 'Never make assumptions'?" he asked.

It was a moment before Jack replied. "It was something she said to me, when I told her that the retcon would work on her and wouldn't do her any harm. That was right before she dumped her coffee over me and stormed out."

"That was more than six hours ago, sir," said Ianto. "The retcon ought to have run its course."

"And clearly it didn't work," said Jack. "And she knew it wouldn't, or at least had some inkling." A pause. "Did you get a good image of her on the CCTV?"

"Must have," said Ianto, going back into the Office and over to his computer. "She came right up to the desk."

"Start running facial recognition software. I want to know who she is. And in the meantime, I guess the rest of us had better go check out this third body. Let me know if you come up with something."

"Yes, sir," said Ianto. He considered the note again. Gwen Cooper's handwriting was beautiful — slanted and elegant, and perfectly straight even on unlined paper. It reminded him of the handwriting on the older documents and labels in the archive, dating back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Calligraphic and old-fashioned. Who had handwriting like that these days?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've never been to Cardiff, so I picked the corner of Queen and Charles pretty much at random off a roadmap. If anyone knows the city and knows a different corner building that would be more suitable, I'd be happy to hear about it!


	3. Here Come the Gnomes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gnomes make their appearance, and the team figures out a few things about Gwen.

After gaining access to the roof of the building named in Gwen Cooper's note, Jack and the team did indeed find another body with its throat bitten into. The man who unlocked the doors for them was able to identify him as a business man who worked in the building, an Irishman called Connor Donovan. He'd been missing for three days, which fit the condition of the body and Gwen Cooper's assessment.

"There's something that jumps out at me," said Owen as he examined the body. "This guy's three days old, which means he was the first victim. And his throat wound is also the most savage — this one really looks like an animal ripped it out. The one from the Bay is clinical by comparison, and the one from the alley is somewhere between the two."

Jack came closer, wrinkling his nose. "Are the teeth marks changing as well?"

"I think so," said Owen. "The bite pattern looks a bit more human every time."

"The shapeshifting kind of Plasmavore," said Jack grimly.

"So … it's getting more human with each person it eats?" said Tosh.

"Yup. Assimilating the blood and the DNA until it can blend in with the humans."

"If it's assimilating DNA," said Suzie slowly, "is there a chance that'll it'll look like the people it's killed?"

Jack shrugged. "Sure, but it'll look like a mish-mash of all of them, and you've seen how little some kids can look like their parents. Plus, with each new person it consumes, the DNA gets more dilute, and the less it looks like any one of them in particular."

"Well, it's only eaten three so far," said Tosh.

"That we know of," said Owen. "This poor bastard's been here for days. Who knows how many others might be hidden around somewhere?"

"Owen's right," said Jack. "We have no way of knowing how many people it might have killed already, so don't count on any sort of facial resemblance. But if you do see someone who reminds you of one of the victims, don't turn your back on them."

It was as they were loading Connor Donovan into a body bag and carrying him to the door off the roof that Jack happened to look up and see her. She was standing on the roof across the street, higher than theirs, watching them. She was a good ways off, but Jack saw the black hair flying in the wind and recognised the dark leather jacket. She turned from the edge and disappeared from view.

"Jack?" said Suzie. "Something wrong?"

"Gwen Cooper," he said. "She was watching us from the next roof."

***

Actually, she'd been watching them from the same roof, and listening to every word they said. But she had bounded over to the next roof when she'd seen they were leaving, the sound of her movement masked by the wind, before deliberately staging an appearance. Gwen had a lot more information to work with now. Not enough, but more. She knew what was killing these people; now if only she could work out a way to find it.

Could she lure it out somehow? Was there something that the three victims had in common, something that had attracted the creature to them? She wished she could get a look at this third victim. Were they all male? Could the creature be targeting larger men, who'd have the greatest volume of blood in their bodies? If so, then she wouldn't make the best bait. That Jack Harkness would be better. Oh, she'd love to use him as bait. It would be such excellent revenge. 

Not that she'd let him get eaten, of course. She wasn't that vindictive.

She chewed her lip in thought, sitting on the edge of a rooftop. All three victims had been killed in relatively isolated places — but of course they had. Most premeditated killings were, excepting poisonings. Somebody tended to try and stop you, otherwise. What else… Could they all have taken place at night? It seemed pretty likely, but she had no way of knowing.

So … what could she do? Wander isolated places at night and hope for sheer dumb luck? Yeah … no. Half the city would be dead before she caught it at that rate. She needed more.

She needed Torchwood.

***

"So do you think this Gwen Cooper could be the Plasmavore?" asked Suzie as they drove back to the Hub. "She did direct us to one of the bodies."

"Anything's possible," said Jack. "But it would be odd behaviour for a Plasmavore. They're predators; they like to disappear and pass unnoticed among their prey population. They don't like the tables being turned and being hunted themselves. If this one is drawing our attention to it on purpose, then it must have a pretty compelling reason."

"It might want something from us," said Suzie. "This Gwen Cooper definitely knows more about us than she should."

They arrived at the Hub and helped Owen get the two bodies down to the autopsy room. Then Jack checked in with Ianto.

"The facial recognition software is running, but nothing has turned up yet," he reported. Gwen's picture was displayed on the screen in front of him. Jack leaned over him for a better look.

"Yup, that's definitely her. Weevil-ass-kicking, coffee-dumping Gwen Cooper. Damn, she's gorgeous," he added with a sigh.

"And possibly an alien," added Ianto pointedly.

"Never stopped me before," said Jack cheerfully.

"Possibly an alien serial-killer."

"That _does_ put a bit of a damper on it."

Ianto sighed. "Your coat is in your office, sir. I got all the coffee out of it."

"Excellent!" Jack disappeared to his office to retrieve the most important part of his image. He reappeared a minute later and shouted through the Hub, "All right, who left a garden gnome in my office?"

Ianto, Tosh, and Suzie all turned to look at him. He held a garden gnome in a blue coat and floppy red cap in his hand and was trying to look stern.

"Certainly not me," said Tosh.

"I dislike garden gnomes," said Ianto flatly.

"Don't look at me, I didn't do it," said Suzie.

Jack sighed. "Owen!" he called, heading for the autopsy room.

***

It turned out that Owen was terrified of garden gnomes. He reacted to the appearance of this one by chasing it and Jack out of the autopsy room with a scalpel. Which, on the downside (from Owen's perspective, anyway), meant that his colleagues now knew about his irrational fear of garden decorations, but on the upside removed him from the list of suspects.

Jack returned to the main room and looked over each of his other three employees in turn. Tosh looked baffled, Suzie rolled her eyes at the whole thing, and Ianto was giving the gnome a look of distaste. Then a thought seemed to strike him.

"You know…" said Ianto slowly. "If our esteemed Doctor Harper has an irrational fear of garden gnomes, I might just have to revise my dislike for them."

Jack snorted with laughter and held out the gnome to Ianto. "You want it?"

Ianto received it graciously. "Thank you, sir." And he glided off towards the kitchen.

"I sense revenge for the 'Teaboy' designation incoming," said Suzie wryly.

Jack grinned. "Should be fun, then. You're sure neither of you brought it in?"

They both shot him flat looks. "If I'd done it, I'd have put it on Owen's desk to begin with," said Tosh.

"I wouldn't have gone for a _garden gnome_ ," said Suzie with a snort.

Jack considered them for a second longer, then shrugged and turned away. He was prepared to let it slide.

He revised that opinion an hour and a half later, when he found another gnome in the lavatory. This one had a green jacket and an orange cap. He went back to the conference room, where Ianto was setting out dishes of takeaway and the rest of the team was getting ready for supper. 

"All right, really, who is leaving these?"

But he got no more answers than he did the first time, and Owen was in a foul mood for the rest of the evening thanks to the incursion of gnomes into his workplace. Jack quietly handed the second gnome to Ianto and told him to please keep them away from Owen for a bit. Ianto agreed.

Owen had little new to report from his autopsies and spent most of the meal in sullen silence. Jack made up for this by being louder and more exuberant than usual. Then, just as they were finishing, the conversation was interrupted by a beeping from Tosh's computer. She went to go look.

"The facial recognition search has turned up something," she called to the rest of them. "Ninety per cent match … oh." The eagerness in her voice drained to bafflement on that last syllable. The others looked at each other and then got up to go see.

Tosh's screen displayed a sepia-toned photograph of a group of people. There were two men at the back in suits — butlers or valets, maybe — and three women in front of them in very old-fashioned maids' outfits. The face on the bottom right was very familiar.

Jack leaned close. "That looks a hell of a lot like her," he said quietly.

"The picture is of the household staff of a Cardiff family," said Tosh. "It's dated 1867. The names of the people are written in the margins of the photograph, but the handwriting is hard to read…"

Ianto leaned in next to Jack. "Gwyneth Evans," he said. "It says Gwyneth Evans."

"Hello, Gwyneth," muttered Jack.

"We can't be sure that's her," protested Owen. "She'd have to be — what — more than a hundred and fifty years old! It might just be her great-great-great grandmother, or something."

"Wait, I've got another result," said Tosh. "1926, Australia — a photograph of a dinner party from a ladies' magazine, eighty-two per cent match."

A black-and-white picture filled the screen. The reason for the lower percentage was immediately apparent: Gwyneth Evans had been staring expressionlessly at the camera in the fashion of her time, but this woman had been caught at an angle in a candid photo, grinning at someone across the table.

"That's her," said Jack firmly. "Look at the gap between her top teeth. Gwen Cooper has exactly the same smile."

"Gwendolen Williams," reported Tosh. "An English lady touring the Australian colonies — though in those days they'd say English when they really meant British, so who knows."

"Ooh, gone up in the world, hasn't she?" said Suzie. "And I'm sensing a naming theme."

"Another result," said Tosh. "America, Woodstock, 1969. No name to go with it. Seventy-four per cent match." This one was in colour and showed a bunch of twenty-somethings dancing. The angle on their girl was worse than the last one, but her big eyes and the distinctive gap in her top teeth were clearly visible.

"Christ," muttered Owen.

"So what are we dealing with?" asked Suzie, looking at Jack.

Jack stood back and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "Not a Plasmavore — her appearance is too consistent, for one thing. And she's too old, for another; Plasmavores don't live much more than fifty years, and they haven't developed time-travel technology. So whatever she is, she isn't what's been killing people."

"We know she's at least a hundred and fifty years old, and she's resistant to retcon," offered Tosh. "Anything else?"

"She's got a talent for disappearing," said Ianto, "and handwriting of about the right vintage to go with that first photograph."

"She can take out a Weevil unarmed," put in Suzie. "And she must like rooftops. How else would she have come across the body, if she wasn't involved?"

"Not bloody much to go on," said Owen cynically.

"Well, let's sleep on it," said Jack. "We're not getting any farther tonight. Go home, you people."

So they did, unaware that Gwen had managed to slip in with them while they'd had the door propped open to wheel in the two bodies, unaware that she was still lurking in the shadows. She found herself a place to bed down on a catwalk in the upper reaches of the Hub, but just left her stuff there for the time being. She wanted to look through this place while its occupants were away.

Jack Harkness, it turned out, slept in the building, so she'd have to be careful and keep invisible, but she could do that. She was enormously curious about the contents of the desks, and the massive archives below, but her main priority had to be finding a way to come and go as she pleased.

Torchwood's security was pretty lax; there had to be a way. She'd find one if it took her all night.

***

The next morning, Jack climbed out of manhole over his bunker to find a gnome staring at him. It was the first one, the one he'd found in his office. He picked it up and stared at it.

The Hub was still deserted. No one had arrived yet. And Ianto had hidden the gnomes last night. So unless Ianto had crept back in at some point during the night to move the gnome…

Jack did a complete sweep of the Hub. He didn't find anything out of place, but he also didn't find the other gnome.

Ianto came in just after he'd finished. "Good morning, sir."

"Ianto, where did you put the gnomes last night?"

The question brought him up short. "Under the kitchen sink. Why?"

"They're not there now, and one of them was waiting for me just outside my bunker this morning." Jack pointed to where it was sitting on a table, grinning a little gnome grin that was looking creepier with every passing minute. They both stared at it.

"Either something has got into the Hub," said Jack slowly, "or there's something seriously wrong with these gnomes. I'm starting to understand why Owen finds them so disturbing." He turned to Ianto. "You check the CCTV, the Rift monitor, all the sensors — see if they've picked up anything. I'm going to take a closer look at _this_." He picked up the gnome.

When Tosh and Owen came in ten minutes later, Tosh stopped dead and stared at Jack, making Owen nearly crash into her. "Why are you using our scanner on a garden gnome?"

"What, don't you ever spend your free time scanning gnomes?" asked Jack with a grin. Then he sobered — well, a little. "The gnomes moved during the night. I decided to check this one for alien tech. But there's nothing, so I guess they must just be possessed."

Owen groaned and rubbed his face. "Oh god, my nightmares are coming to life."

"Sir!" called Ianto, coming out of the kitchen. "I found the other one. It was in the fridge."

Jack snorted, and Owen made a little sound of horror.

"Did you find anything, sir?" asked Ianto.

"Nothing. You?"

"Not a thing. We unfortunately only have CCTV in the main room, cells, medical and autopsy rooms, and the entrances. There's nothing in the kitchen, so the gnomes' exit from the cupboard under the sink went unrecorded. And none of the other instruments showed anything unusual."

"This is absurd!" cried Tosh. "We aren't seriously considering garden gnomes moving about under their own power, are we?"

"Moving … or being carried," said Jack. "It's possible something has got into the Hub. I want all of you on your guard at all times. Don't dismiss odd noises or funny feelings. And tell Suzie as soon as she gets in."

***

During her nighttime explorations, Gwen had identified a lift that rose up into the middle of Roald Dahl Plass. She had been initially baffled by it — how on earth did this avoid notice?

Triggering it had been a big risk, since Jack Harkness was still in the building, and for all she knew activating it might set off alarms. But it hadn't. 

The lift was an open platform with no walls and, as far as Gwen could tell, no camera monitoring it — finding the CCTV feeds in the control centre had been her first priority, and she'd had a good look at their coverage. She'd wondered why the lift was unwatched at first, but once she'd seen it up close, she decided it looked like more of an emergency back door than a way in. There might not even be a way to activate it from the outside.

She didn't get on the platform as it rose. Instead, she let it get about halfway up. That was when the door to the outside world opened. Then she'd killed the lift and leapt up onto the platform with a boosted jump.

Cool air hit her face. She could see the stars and hear water. Her heart soared. One more leap took her up into the Plass.

She enjoyed the open air and the burbling fountain for a minute before turning back to puzzle over this odd thing. Her eyes slid right off it. She had to force them back, squint to make the hole in the ground come into focus. 

Then it hit her — there was some strange twist of energy around the spot, actively deflecting attention away from it. It was a natural shield, a hiding spot in plain sight that Torchwood had somehow discovered and taken advantage of. It was _brilliant_.

She did wonder why people didn't just obliviously wander over it and fall in, though. But then she supposed that it probably wasn't left open much; that was asking for trouble.

As she'd suspected, there didn't seem to be any way to open it from the outside without some sort of remote trigger device, so Gwen dared to leave it open behind her. She needed some food, a little time amongst green things … and a few more garden gnomes.

When she came back, the hole was still open. She jumped in and shut it behind her. 

It was far from ideal as a way in and out, but it would do for the moment.

***

Later that day, Ianto found a new gnome under his desk in the Tourist Office. Then Suzie found one stuffed into a filing cabinet. They'd left the two first gnomes in the view of the CCTV camera in the cells — since Owen absolutely refused to have them in the medical sections — with Tosh keeping an eye on the feed. Just before lunch, the camera jerked to one side, as if something had bumped it. Tosh jumped on the controls and panned it back, but too late. The gnomes were gone.

Ianto found one of them in the dishwasher when he was loading in the dishes from lunch. Tosh found the other bundled up inside her coat. Owen let out a great shout when he found another new one bobbing in the toilet. He shut himself into the medical bay and refused to come out, saying he'd piss into beakers if he had to.

And to make matters worse, they were all hearing noises — rustling, the faintest scuffing of footsteps, the occasional soft bump. They all took to carrying their scanners with them everywhere. They all caught at least one odd reading — except Owen, who was, as previously mentioned, shut in the med bay — but it disappeared before they could pin it down.

When it came time to go home, the team's feelings were mixed. Owen tore out of there as fast as he could, but Tosh hesitated. She was eager to get away from the Hub and its apparent haunting by garden gnomes (dear god her _life_ ), but what if this thing followed her home? She could deal with it with her colleagues by her side; it was even funny. But alone, with garden gnomes following her around her flat and moving every time she took her eyes off them?

She swallowed. If that happened, she could always come running back.

Ianto's main thoughts were of the secret he had hidden in the basement. Was she safe? Should he just pretend to leave and then spend the night here? Jack might notice…

In the end, he went home, but he didn't sleep much.

Suzie was torn between fascination with this new phenomenon — Rift-animated lawn ornaments? Could that possibly be a thing? — and wanting to get home and have a stiff drink. Even for Torchwood, this was a new level of weird.

And Jack … Jack couldn't deny some apprehension at the prospect spending the night alone, in the dark, with a lot of haunted garden gnomes. At first, he intended to forgo sleep and spend the night just keeping an eye on things. But the feeling of being watched grew to unbearable intensity. He couldn't stop looking over his shoulder, so he sat with his back to a wall. Then he started hearing faint noises. It was like a goddamn horror movie. Except with gnomes.

"I know you're there," he called, his voice reverberating through the empty Hub. "Why are you hiding?"

Silence, so complete it echoed.

"Come on, now." Jack brought up the charming grin. "Surely you want to come and have a word with a handsome guy like me."

Nothing.

"What do you want?" demanded Jack, dropping the charm. 

Still nothing.

"Whatever you are, _who_ ever you are, you better not hurt my team," Jack warned the empty base. "Because if you do, I will find you, and I will kill you."

Silence reigned for a long few minutes, and Jack slumped back against the wall with a sigh.

_Clunk._

Jack was on his feet with a gun in his hand in an instant. The noise had come from the conference room. He edged in, gun first.

A bearded little gnome stood on the table, facing the door. It had a purple cap and a green jacket and was holding a little miniature rake. In the tines of the rake was something white — a piece of paper. Jack reached out warily and plucked it out.

There were a few lines of writing on it, written in a very familiar old-fashioned hand.

_No need to worry about your team; it's you I'm really after. Revenge for the coffee and all. But I'm done for the night, so you can go to bed. Even haunted garden gnomes need to sleep sometime._

_P.S. You need some plants down here. Good for mental health._

Jack breathed a deep breath. Gwen Cooper. He should have known. And then a dreadful inkling started at the base of his skull. Gwen Cooper could be invisible, slip in and out of places like a ghost. She was hundreds of years old. There was an intensity about her, a wildness that he'd felt within moments of meeting her. It had been very attractive. And she thought they needed _plants_.

"Oh, shit," he muttered aloud, despite knowing that chances were he would be overheard. "Tell me we don't have a faerie."

He got his answer: faint, tinkling laughter from the depths of the Hub.

***

That was the night that Gwen met the pterodactyl. She was climbing in the uppermost reaches of the Hub when the great creature had swooped in and landed nearby with a screech that nearly frightened Gwen right off her ledge.

Gwen stared at the pterodactyl. The pterodactyl stared at her. Gwen rubbed her eyes and blinked furiously. The pterodactyl was still there. It clacked its beak at her. Gwen cleared her throat and did her damnedest to project 'Hi, I'm friendly' vibes. "Uh, hello."

The pterodactyl cocked its head at her. She swallowed and wondered what the hell she ought to do now. She hadn't felt this off-balance in about sixty years. …It was pretty cool, actually. Maybe she should just try her standard befriend-the-wild-animal routine and see how it went?

It went pretty well, as it turned out. It took about fifteen minutes of 'Hi, I'm friendly' turned up to eleven, and Gwen was uncomfortably aware that the creature was hoping for food off her, but it allowed her to come close and even to touch it. It made crooning noises at her, and she made crooning noises back, mimicking as well as she could considering her vocal chords were _so_ never intended for this purpose.

Once she felt they had a good enough rapport that it wouldn't try to eat her once her back was turned, Gwen's mind relaxed enough that a thought occurred to her. The pterodactyl hadn't been here when she'd first come up. It had to have got in somehow. Which meant there had to be a hole up here somewhere — a _big_ hole. She turned her nose up and sniffed. A whiff of the sea … a breeze … yes!

It didn't take much more climbing to find it. A whacking great big opening, undefended unless you considered that it led to a pterosaur nest. Torchwood probably thought it didn't need defending, considering their extremely unconventional guard dog and the fact that you'd need to fly to get in and out of it.

But fortunately, Gwen could. Albeit for short distances only. And now she'd found her way in and out. With a grin that probably qualified as manic, she jumped.

There was an all-night supermarket nearby. She picked up — all right, stole — another day's worth of food and some improvised pterodactyl treats, and also gave into temptation and grabbed a remote-controlled car that advertised itself as "The fastest one on the market!" Stealing a child's toy was harder to justify than taking food, but as this toy didn't yet belong to a child, Gwen's conscience didn't give her too much grief.

She also acquired a couple more gnomes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I once met a guy with a phobia of garden gnomes. It stuck with me, and this is the result. _The Invasion of the Garden Gnomes._
> 
> Apologies to any other gnomophobes, or whatever the heck the proper word is for a person with an irrational fear of garden gnomes.


	4. Vampires and Wormholes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Almost done now. I have to admit, this is my favourite chapter.

When Jack ventured out of his bunker the next morning, he found the gnomes had all changed position again, and he was pretty sure the number had increased. They were scattered through the Hub, everywhere except the medical section. Jack wondered at the fact that Gwen seemed to be being considerate of Owen. Why would she care?

Jack left the gnomes where they were, hoping to keep all this from escalating. So that's how the others found them when they came in, with Jack sitting in the middle, holding Gwen's two notes.

"Jack?" said Suzie, looking around at the gnomes, all of which were angled to be smiling at the door. It was creepy.

"Get in here, all of you," said Jack. "I know what's doing this." The whole team was arrayed around him within moments, Owen as twitchy as if he were standing on an anthill. Jack held up the notes and described the events of the previous night.

_"Faeries?"_ said Ianto with a strange look on his face.

Jack scowled. "Some people call them faeries. But don't let the name fool you. They are dangerous," he said grimly. "They're like nothing we've ever dealt with before. They're not alien; they're part of us, part of our world, yet we know nothing about them. So we pretend to know what they look like. We see them as happy. We imagine they have tiny little wings and are bathed in moonlight.

"But in reality..." Jack's stare bored into them. "Think something you can only half see, like a glimpse, like something out of the corner of your eye with a touch of myth, a touch of the spirit world, a touch of reality, all jumbled together. Old moments and memories that are frozen in amongst it. Like debris spinning around a ringed planet — tossing, turning, _whirling_. Backwards and forwards through time.

"Gwen Cooper is one of two kinds of faerie. There are the Little People, and the People of Peace. The Little People are much less human-looking and much more dangerous. They're as old as nature itself, and they can bend its forces to their will. The People of Peace came along later. Some think they're a cross between the Little People and humans, but no one actually knows. They can pass for human, and they're the ones who inspire great poets and artists with amazing sex and then drive them mad or exhaust them into an early grave.

"And both groups are known for luring people away, stealing them. The Little People take children, while the People of Peace prefer adults. They lead you away into the primordial forests and make you like them."

There was a long silence, everyone glancing over their shoulders with the eerie feeling that they were being watched.

"Okay…" said Owen slowly. "We've got a super-dangerous ancient nature spirit hiding in the Hub. Question: _Why the bloody garden gnomes?_ "

Wordlessly, Jack handed him the newest note. Owen scanned it. His eyebrows shot up.

" _This_ is revenge for the retcon in her coffee?" he said, gesturing incredulously at their surroundings.

"Faeries tend to be playful and whimsical," said Jack. "But they can turn nasty in a heartbeat." He hesitated for an instant, then went on like he was forcing himself to speak. "I used to be in the army, captain of a platoon. We were on a train — troop transport. Some of my men had angered the Little People the previous day. The train passed through a tunnel. We heard fluttering — thought some birds had flown in through a window. When we came out the other side ... I was the only one left alive. Every last one of my men had been asphyxiated. By rose petals."

Jack stood and gave each of them in turn a piercing look. "This one's only playing around so far, but that might change. And if it does … I'm the one who crossed her, so I'm the one who should take the hit. I don't want any of you putting yourselves in harm's way, even to protect me. Got it?"

"But Jack—" protested Tosh.

"No buts," Jack cut across her. "My mess, my problem. No arguments."

His team agreed reluctantly.

As Jack walked back into his office, a voice spoke behind him. "Do you know, I think I'm actually starting to like you."

He whirled around and caught moment's view of Gwen Cooper smiling at him before she vanished behind the open door. Jack darted back out into the Hub and looked behind the door, but she was gone.

Bloody faeries.

 

***

Later that day, Jack was sitting at his desk, actually doing paperwork for once, when he heard a little motorised _wheeeeee_ sound. He looked up to see a garden gnome go gliding past his open door, small wheels barely visible under its base.

A snort forced its way out of his nose. He buried his face in his hands and laughed helplessly. That was how Ianto found him some ten minutes later, carrying the offending gnome and wearing his best trying-to-look-unimpressed-even-though-I'm-secretly-laughing expression.

"Suzie wishes me to inform you that she is being stalked by a motorised garden gnome," Ianto said, deadpan. "I thought it best to retrieve it before she followed through with her threat to shoot it." He paused. "It was faster than I expected. It took both myself and Tosh to corral it. I believe Owen is still laughing at us."

"He came out of his dungeon?"

"Apparently watching me and Tosh fall over ourselves trying to catch a gnome while Suzie threatened to blow its little ceramic brains out was too good even for him to pass up."

Jack dissolved into giggles again. "Oh, tell me there's CCTV footage."

"Unfortunately, sir," Ianto confirmed with a sigh and a nod. "I'm sure Owen will send it to everyone before the day is out."

When Jack got his giggles under control, he asked, "How did she motorise it?"

Ianto turned it upside down to show him. "It would appear she simply affixed an ordinary child's toy into the base. Presumably she has the remote control. ...Or at least, I'm hoping there's a remote control, because otherwise she gave artificial intelligence to a garden gnome, and I'd prefer not to contemplate that idea."

Jack snorted with laughter, eyes sparkling. "Oh, the possibilities… I'd like to stick a few of those into the Houses of Parliament. Now _that_ would be fun."

"If you say so, sir,"

 

***

Tosh stared intently at her computer, sure she was getting close to something. The Rift monitor had been picking up minor but odd fluctuations over the last three days. They hadn't been enough to set off any alarms, but they fit the timescale of the killings. She needed to isolate what was happening, see if she could track it…

_Wheeeeeee._ Tosh looked up. The motorised gnome rolled up to her feet and nudged her gently. It had a mug of coffee wedged between its rake and head, further secured with a bungee cord wrapped around its neck. There was a sticky note on the mug. Tosh plucked it off.

_Tosh,_

_I asked it to deliver your coffee. Let me know if it works._

_— Ianto,_

Tosh snorted. "So he's got you delivering coffee now, has he? That was fast." Then she leaned down on her desk and buried her face in her arms. "Oh god, I'm talking to a garden gnome."

Faint female laughter echoed from somewhere above. Feeling daring, Tosh called up to it, "Yes, yes, it's hilarious."

"What's hilarious?" asked Suzie, coming in.

Tosh pointed. "Our new gnomish coffee delivery system. Ianto's doing. Somehow."

Suzie stared, then went to her chair and dropped into it, burying her face in her hands with a hoarse laugh. "This is why we don't have relationships outside work. If we tried to describe this to anyone, we'd get sectioned."

"Sometimes I think we ought to get sectioned," mumbled Tosh, gently extricating her coffee from the bungee cord. A little had spilled over the edge on the trip, but Ianto had thoughtfully included a napkin to deal with such eventualities. Tosh wiped the mug and sipped. Ah. Heaven.

Its burden removed, the gnome turned round and wheeled off again. Tosh and Suzie watched it go. Suzie sighed and rubbed her face. "Please tell me you've got something for us to do. I need to get out of here for a while."

Tosh looked back at her computer. "Well, I might have something…"

Five minutes later, she was briefing the whole team. "I think I've come up with a way to track our Plasmavore. It isn't perfect, but it's a start." She pulled up a map of Cardiff on her screen. It was marked with dozens of dots, each with a date and time listed beside them. "Our instruments have been picking up small fluctuations in the Rift for a few days now, and I've managed to track them to their source." She pointed to the dots. "Each event in the Rift is immediately preceded by a signal from some sort of extra-terrestrial tech. It's like it's sending out pings, like a bat echo-locating."

"That," said Jack, leaning in close for a better look at Tosh's screen, "has got to be a wormhole generator — look at the pattern. Wow. Wonder where they got that — that's advanced technology, way beyond Plasmavores."

"What does it do, exactly?" asked Tosh. "You can't just go about punching wormholes willy-nilly in the fabric of space and time, surely."

"Not without huge amounts of power," agreed Jack. "They'd have to drain the entire planet's electrical power for the better part of a week to make one. But," he raised a finger and smirked wryly, "if you're dealing with a place where there's already a rift in space and time…"

Owen groaned. "Let me guess: it's a lot easier."

"In one," agreed Jack. "Think of it as like an escape hatch. The wormhole generator can use the Rift to create a safe way off Planet Earth. The only problem is that it has to open the Rift to do it, and after the wormhole's gone, the Rift might close by itself again, or … it might blow wide open."

"And that would be bad," said Tosh.

"To the tune of maybe destroying the planet, yeah," said Jack, starting to get that we-are-in-Mortal-Peril-and-I'm-enjoying-it grin.

"So we need to find them before they do that," said Suzie, peering more closely at the map.

"The pings happen at a regular interval of slightly more than an hour," said Tosh, "so we can track their movements over the past few days." She clicked a few buttons and coloured lines connected the dots from oldest to most recent. "As you can see, there isn't much of a pattern; they seem to be wandering. But they're keeping mostly to the back streets, alleys, and parks — places where it would be easier to pick people off. The most recent reading is from Bute Park, forty-six minutes ago."

"Well done, Tosh," said Jack. "Save that map; we're going to have to retrace their steps to check for more bodies. But our first priority is catching the creature. Now." He went into briefing mode. "Plasmavores are nasty creatures and not much liked by anybody, but compared to a lot of the stuff we deal with, they're not that dangerous. Their main weapons are stealth and disguise: they rely on their victims not realising the danger until the Plasmavore's teeth are in their neck. The second they suspect they've been identified, that someone's after them, they run.

"Other civilisations across the galaxy will take extreme measures when they suspect they've got a Plasmavore, like isolating an entire city so no one can get in or out until the Plasmavore is found. Obviously, we can't do that to Cardiff, so we're going to have to get this right the first time."

"So what's the plan?" asked Suzie, tense and ready.

"Somebody's going to have to be bait. We need to lure them out without their suspecting we're onto them. And it had better be me, because I've got the most body mass and therefore the most blood. I'll be the most tempting target."

"All the victims so far have been men on the taller side," said Owen thoughtfully. He smirked. "You want to play bait, no complaints from me."

"And the rest of us just hide in the bushes and jump out at the opportune moment?" said Suzie.

Jack grinned. "That's the plan. But better in a car than in a bush; these things have pretty sharp noses, and you'll be harder to smell in a car. Come on, now, people!" He clapped his hands. "Grab your gear! It’s getting dark out there. Ianto, hold the fort!"

And off they went.

 

***

Of course Gwen followed them. Or rather, knowing where they were going, she made her own way to Bute Park and then tracked them down. She found the Torchwood SUV (really? It hadn't occurred to them to choose something that would blend in better?) with Owen, Suzie, and Toshiko lurking inside.

By the time she found Jack, though, things were already going pear-shaped.

She heard him shout and came through the trees to find him charging after a pair of dark figures. On the ground was the pale body of a woman. Gwen ran to her first.

She was pretty, young, heavily made up, and smelled of cheap perfume. Very likely a prostitute. Gwen checked for any sign of life. The People of Peace were great healers, though Gwen herself had never much talent for it. She could deal with a hole ripped in flesh, but blood loss was one of the toughest things, even for professional healers. And this girl had next to nothing left in her. Gwen realised with a sick twist in her gut that there was nothing she could do.

She gently closed the girl's eyes, kissed her forehead, and murmured an ancient Welsh blessing for the dead. And then she was up and running, nearly flying, her blood burning with anger.

She spotted Jack, who had stopped running and was glaring around and speaking harshly into his comm. Gwen swept right past him, invisible, but her angry presence stirred the trees around him like a rush of wind. He looked up sharply, but she was already gone.

Gwen searched the whole park and then started sweeping through the area around it, Cardiff Castle, the River Taff, and the streets beyond. Nothing.

She returned to the park and the murder scene, her temper buffeting the trees. The Torchwood agents all looked up, Jack wary and angry, the rest nervous. Gwen reined in her anger.

"I thought there wasn't supposed to be any wind tonight," said Toshiko.

"There isn't," said Jack flatly. "That's an angry faerie."

"She's angry about the girl's death?" asked Toshiko.

Jack shrugged. "The Plasmavores are essentially poaching on her turf," he said flatly. "Stands to reason she'd be offended."

"Plasma _vores_?" repeated Suzie.

"There were two," said Jack grimly. "That's why they're killing so often. And now we've spooked them. They'll want to run, but they need the Rift."

"Then we'd better get back there," said Suzie, pulling her long, dark hair out of its ponytail and tying it into a tight bun. "Regroup and come up with a fresh plan."

Jack gave a reluctant half-smile. "That's the spirit. Come on, then, folks."

Gwen rode back on the roof of their (ridiculous) SUV and didn't bother to be particularly subtle about following them back into the Hub. Jack definitely saw the door twitch behind the poor dead girl on the gurney as they wheeled her in.

 

***

For the next hour, the whole team was glued to CCTV feeds monitoring the area — except Tosh, who was paying more attention to trying to find a way to track the Plasmavores by their equipment. The last ping they had was from the park, at just about the time Jack had run them off their latest victim, and nobody wanted to wait an hour to get their next lead.

So Toshiko turned her considerable genius to coming up with a solution, and in the meantime the rest of them searched the cameras of the city for an image of their targets. Jack hadn't got a good enough look at them to describe their faces, but he had seen their shape and clothes — one smaller than the other, both wearing caps, one in a dark red jacket and one in a black one. He'd know them if he saw them again. But nothing came up.

The next ping came from Mermaid Quay, disturbingly close to Roald Dahl Plass and the Rift. The team went charging out to canvas the area, leaving Ianto on the Rift monitor. But again they found nothing, and after fifteen minutes of fruitless searching, they trudged back into the Hub. The team took comfort in the fact that Tosh was muttering endlessly under her breath and clearly had an idea.

Another tense and boring hour of flicking through video feeds passed. Tosh was typing furiously, growling to herself and occasionally smacking her computer with frustration.

"Easy, Tosh, I don't think that's good for it," said Owen. Tosh gave a louder growl, and he wisely ducked away, looking at his own screen. Then he suddenly sat forward. His voice changed. "Jack, come have a look at this." He had the whole team crammed together to peer over his shoulders within a moment.

Two figures stood just outside an alley, talking to each other. Both wore caps, one in a black jacket and one in dark red.

"That's them," said Jack.

One of them pointed across the street at a man in a hoodie, walking away from him. They set off in his direction, crossing the street at the edge of frame.

"Shit," said Jack, "they're after another one. Where is that?"

"Wharton Street," said Owen, "back up in the city centre."

Jack was already moving, grabbing his coat. "Right, team, let’s _go_!"


	5. The Impossible Tree

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter! There's a hell of a lot more to this universe, though. It's kinda run away with me. It's a little scary to admit I have 80,000 words written in this series already. It was just a fun little idea that I started writing on a whim, and then it spiralled out of control. I'm still having fun, though, so I'll keep going.

Jack's terrifying driving got them there within minutes. They found the victim lying in Trinity Street, by the Cardiff Market. There was no sign of the Plasmavores.

The first thing that caught Owen's attention was that there was blood this time. He dashed to the victim's side and felt the young man's neck. "Shit. Jack! This one's still alive!" He was bleeding badly, but his throat wasn't torn open. He still had a chance.

Jack came running back from searching the area. "What are his chances?"

"Good, if we can get him to a hospital right now."

Jack grimaced, torn for an instant between the civilian's life and the search. Then he cursed himself mentally. The Doctor would be ashamed of him. There was only one thing to do.

"Take him there — take the car. Suzie, help him. Tosh, you're with me; I need your brain." Suzie started to protest, not wanting to miss the action, but shut up when Jack glared at her. He cursed under his breath as his orders were carried out. Damn it, they should have brought two cars.

As Owen and Suzie roared away in the SUV, Tosh's attention remained on her tablet. She had continued to work on her tracking program even as she was thrown about in the back of the SUV. Jack hoped that her intense focus was a sign of an impending breakthrough.

"Tosh, come on, we'll have to go on foot—"

"A _ha_!" she nearly shrieked. "I've got them!"

He was at her side in an instant. "Where are they?"

She stared at the screen, then turned it so he could see. "Heading back for the Plass."

***

Jack and Tosh took off running. Jack called Owen and Suzie on the comm to tell them to get back as fast as they could move. Then he tried to call Ianto, but all he got was static. Tosh tried and got the same. Then she looked at her tablet and made a sound of distress.

"Something's blocking us from the Hub, jamming the signals. I've got nothing — I can't track them anymore."

"We don't need to track them," growled Jack. "We know where they're going: the Rift. This was a distraction. That's why they left the kid alive."

He put on an extra turn of speed and was soon leaving Tosh in his dust. He considered leaving her behind, but was assaulted of an image of her with her throat torn out, skin white, mouth gaping in a silent scream. They were being led about by the nose; one of the Plasmavores could easily be lurking along the road back to the Hub, hoping to get them separated. And Tosh was probably the most vulnerable of them all.

Jack slowed. "Hurry up!" he called to her. And she did, already red and puffing.

They had made it nearly to Callaghan Square when the SUV caught up with them and screeched to a halt beside them. Owen threw the back door open. Jack and Tosh dove in, and Suzie stepped on the gas. Jack filled them in on the situation as he set the gasping, half collapsed Tosh upright beside him.

It was a terrible hour (that was probably only three or four minutes long) before they were sliding to a sideways stop back at the Hub and piling back out of the car.

They dashed into the Tourist Office to find a stand of pamphlets scatted across the floor and Ianto's chair lying on its side in front of the door. No Ianto. Jack threw it aside and pounded on the button to open the Hub. They charged in, guns in hand. 

The ride down in the lift bordered on the absurd, with all four of them fingering their weapons, bouncing on the balls of their feet, and generally looking like they urgently needed to pee. And then they all tried to squeeze through the doors before they were properly open. They were in.

The first thing Jack saw was Ianto, kneeling in the centre of the Hub — kneeling at an odd angle, his head tilted back and a grimace on his face. Jack blinked in confusion, and the Plasmavore holding Ianto came suddenly into focus. It had him by the hair and was holding a large, shining knife to his throat.

Jack threw out his arms to stop his team behind him.

"What—?" asked Tosh, sounding baffled.

"Perception filter," said Jack shortly. "That's why we couldn't find them before. One's got Ianto; the other one is around here somewhere. Find it, but stay together. You know what to look for; that should be enough."

The team put their backs together, guns ready, and scanned the Hub. Jack focussed on the Plasmavore holding Ianto. It was male, dark-haired and wearing a big grin.

"Now, now," it said, "don't come any closer. I'm just barely holding myself in check as it is — such a soft, young throat … such sweet blood…" It leaned in closer, pressing its cheek and the side of its mouth to Ianto's exposed neck. It grinned to show its sharp, carnivorous teeth. Jack saw Ianto swallow hard. The Plasmavore's eyes flicked to Jack. "You don't want to give me a reason."

"Hurt him, and I will kill you, even if I have to hunt you halfway across the galaxy," said Jack, voice full of dark fury.

Ianto swallowed again. "Sorry, Jack," he said quietly, trying not to move his throat with the knife pressed into it. "I didn't even hear them come in."

Jack's face softened for a moment. "Not your fault — they've got a damn strong perception filter. Where did you get that?" he addressed the creature. "'Cause that isn't Plasmavore technology."

"Picked it up along the way," it said coyly. "Its previous owner was ever so tasty."

"Jack," whispered Suzie. "Other one's by the Mainframe, hooking something up to it."

Jack looked without moving his head. His eyes tried to slide off it, but he forced them back. The other Plasmavore, a female, was up to its elbows in wires and circuit boards. They were hooking up their wormhole generator to the Mainframe, drawing power from Torchwood. They were going to use Torchwood's own tech to help them open the Rift. Jack gritted his teeth.

"So," he said, taking a would-be-casual step to one side, "on the run, are you? Kill anybody important?"

The male Plasmavore shrugged. "Oh, we're always on the run. It's how we live our lives — find a new place, kill a few people, move on as soon as people start to notice. Always running. It's an adventurous life, plenty of fun."

Jack couldn't help a scowl. Like an evil, subtler version of the Doctor, these creatures. It felt like some sort of weird sacrilege. 

He wanted them to stop existing.

"You left it a bit late this time," he said casually, taking another step. A little further and he'd have a clear enough shot to put a bullet through the thing's head without touching Ianto.

The Plasmavore sighed ruefully. "Weren't expecting you humans to catch on so quickly, a little backwards species on a little backwards planet. I admit we shouldn't have let our guard down. Ah-ah-ah!" he scolded Jack, shifting around so Ianto was still between them. He also shot a glare at Suzie, who, Jack noticed, had been trying to edge around the creature the other way, flanking it. "Don't you move, now. Or you can watch this one bleed out in your arms."

A drop of blood welled up around the tip of the knife and ran down Ianto's neck. "Aahh," whispered the Plasmavore with pleasure. He leaned down and licked the trickle of blood, his gleaming eyes fixed on Jack. Ianto shuddered, his fists clenched and his eyes squeezed shut.

"Soooo tasty," the Plasmavore murmured into Ianto's neck. "How I'd love to drink you dry." He grinned. "Maybe we'll take you with us. One for the road, so to speak."

Ianto's eyes popped back open, wide with horror. He looked at Jack — for reassurance, hope, rescue, Jack wasn't sure. But Jack was stymied. He couldn't get a shot; Ianto was too good a human shield. And if any of them moved, Ianto's throat would be slit wide, and chances were the other Plasmavore would take the risk of activating the wormhole before everything was ready. Chances of blowing the Rift open wide: waaaaaay too good.

Jack spoke through gritted teeth. "Give us Ianto unharmed, and we'll let you leave."

The creature cocked its head and smirked. "Hmm … maaaybe. We could do that."

But Jack knew, in that moment, that they wouldn't. They'd keep on stalling, dangling Ianto's life over them, until the wormhole was ready. And then both they and Ianto would vanish, or maybe they'd slash his throat and leave him, counting on the team being too busy trying to save their mortally injured comrade to follow.

His teeth clenched, Jack considered scenario after scenario, and in every one of them, Ianto Jones died tonight. Jack would never get a chance to entice the beautiful young man into his bed, never find out what really went on behind that impassive face of his. How old was he? Twenty-four? Practically still a kid — his brain wouldn't even reach maturity until next year.

_And there was nothing he could do._

"Ready," announced the female Plasmavore, coming more sharply into focus as she drew attention to herself. The lights flickered as power was diverted.

"No," snarled Jack, looking desperately for something, _anything_.

Wind blew through the room. At first, Jack thought it was the wormhole opening, air rushing through it. But it hadn't appeared yet. Then he heard a hissing, sizzling sound, and Ianto made a strangled noise of pain. 

The main lights went out. The room was lit only by the glow of the wormhole generator. In the darkness, the creature's knife began to glow orange. Both he and Ianto cried out as their skin burned. The knife clattered to the floor.

Jack started forward, his gun coming up. And then the room exploded into chaos.

Golden light flashed. An enraged scream thundered. A third figure appeared, its skin luminescent, its eyes glowing like lamps. It seized the Plasmavore before he could react, and the Plasmavore shrieked in pain as his skin smoked at the touch.

Gwen, Jack realised dimly, recognising the long, black hair swirling about her. She held a large stick in her hand, its end sharpened to a wicked point.

She flung the screaming Plasmavore down on the ground and followed him with the stick. His screams dissolved into choking and gurgles as the faerie's weapon plunged through his chest.

The other Plasmavore wailed and flung herself at the wormhole generator. 

"No!" shouted Jack, charging forward and raising his gun. 

BANG. He put a bullet through her side, but it didn't even seem to slow her down. The machine made a diabolical screeching noise, and a great section of the floor of the Hub twisted and fell away. Jack barely stopped himself at its edge, teetering. The tunnel dropped and twisted away below him. He stared down it and thought of the rabbit hole in _Alice in Wonderland_.

"Jack!" Tosh and Owen pulled him back. The edge was moving, the hole slowly widening, getting closer. They pulled him further back.

And then Jack heard something that made his heart stop: Ianto shouted in fear and alarm. The remaining Plasmavore had grabbed him. He fought and twisted like a cat in her grip, but a Plasmavore in danger of its life is unnaturally strong. And Ianto was much too close to the edge already. She didn't have to drag him far.

And then Gwen was on them, the male Plasmavore's knife in her hand. In one lightning movement, she stabbed up under the creature's chin, through bone and into her brain. At the same time, the wormhole expanded beneath their feet. All three toppled. The Plasmavore fell bonelessly, while Ianto and Gwen scrabbled at the edge.

Gwen held on. Ianto vanished.

Jack let out an inarticulate cry and escaped the grip of his teammates. He dashed to the edge and looked over, paying no attention to Gwen as she hauled herself out.

The sides of the hole weren't smooth; it was as if it had been punched roughly through the stone, leaving outcroppings and little ledges. And to one of these, about ten feet down, Ianto was clinging.

"Ianto!" Jack shouted down to him. "Hang on! We'll get something down to you." He gestured at his team, and Owen immediately dashed off to find something, followed by Suzie.

Gwen appeared beside Jack, no longer glowing and once again mistakable for an ordinary human being. The hole pushed wider still, leaving Jack's toes hanging over air, and Ianto got further away. The rock he was clinging to was slowly descending into the hole. His eyes met Jack's, and the look in them was hopeless.

Gwen shoved Jack away. "I'll get him! You go get that thing turned off before we all get sucked in." And she swung herself back over the edge, sliding down the rough surface.

Teeth clenched, Jack made himself tear his eyes away and go for the wormhole generator. He'd just have to trust Gwen. There was nothing else he could do. "Tosh! We've got to shut this thing down as soon as they're up!"

He buried himself in working out how to reverse the wormhole and forced himself to believe that it would be all right.

Owen and Suzie returned with a rope of what looked like coats and a blanket tied together. They tossed it over the edge, and within two minutes, Jack looked up to see them helping first Ianto and then Gwen out of the hole.

The instant Gwen had all four limbs on the floor of the Hub, she shouted, "Shut it! Shut it now!"

"Working on it!" Jack shouted back.

And then Tosh called, "Initiating reverse sequence!" The timbre of the wormhole generator's hum changed. The hole in the floor started to shrink — smaller and smaller, until at last it closed completely. The floor was smooth and whole, with Gwen, Ianto, and Owen sprawled on it, Suzie standing over them, and the dead Plasamvore a few yards beyond her. Tosh disconnected the wormhole generator from the Mainframe, and all the lights came back on.

Jack left Tosh to get the computers back in order and dashed over to check Ianto. As he arrived, Gwen was already asking Ianto to let her take a look at him. He offered no protest, focussed on taking deep, calming breaths and recovering his equilibrium.

Gwen took Ianto's wrists and held up his hands. They were torn and bloody, some of the nails ripped or bent back. Jack crouched next to Gwen and grimaced at the damage, while Owen swore softly on her other side. Jack peered at Ianto's abused throat. A small puncture wound below his left ear was oozing blood that trickled down into the collar of his suit, and a line of angry, red burn ran from the puncture down to his collarbone. Gwen winced when she saw it.

"Sorry about the burn. It was the only thing I could think of to get the knife away from him without killing you. I usually attack by electrocuting, but if I'd done that, I'd have shocked you too and might have made the hand with the knife spasm." She grimaced. "And my other techniques are hit and miss when it comes to effectiveness against aliens, so I didn't want to take the risk."

"'S okay," muttered Ianto, but he winced as his throat muscles moved.

Gwen's face set with determination, and she reached toward the injury.

"Woah!" said Owen, going to knock her hand away, but hesitating to actually touch her. "What are you doing?"

"Fixing my mistake," she said simply. "Don't worry; repairing skin is easy."

Jack sucked in a sharp breath, but nodded to Owen to allow it. Ianto watched Gwen nervously and gritted his teeth as she pressed her fingers to the puncture. She then slowly drew her fingers along the burn. The puncture had disappeared, leaving only a red mark, and the burn faded to pink as her hand passed over it. The puffiness went down in moments.

Ianto frowned in confusion and reached up to touch it, but Gwen caught his hand and turned her attention to it. They all watched in fascination as she drew her thumb slowly over a ragged tear in Ianto's palm, the skin fusing back together beneath it. She closed her hand over each of his fingers in turn, restoring the skin to his battered knuckles, and then laid her palm over a big scrape across the back of his hand, making it vanish too. Gwen's focus on her task was intense, and no one interrupted her.

Then she took his forefinger, the nail of which was ripped below the quick and bleeding. She pressed her finger to the base of the nail and stared hard at it. After a moment, her audience realised that it was growing. Right in front of them, the nail grew out until the rip was beyond the quick and the bleeding stopped. Gwen nodded in satisfaction and moved on to the next one.

Within a few minutes, Ianto's skin was whole and his nails repaired on both hands, although much too long and in danger of catching on things.

"There you are," said Gwen, pleased. "All you need is a wash and a trim." She got to her feet.

Ianto stared at her handiwork, dazed. "Thank you."

She shrugged, looking, to Jack's amazement, a bit bashful. "Ah, well, part of it was my fault, anyway. I should have been able to stop you falling in, at least."

Owen took hold of Ianto's hand himself for a closer look. "How the hell did you _do_ that?"

"Stimulated the cells' natural healing process and gave them more power to work with," said Gwen, as if it were simple. "Easy, basic healing — a child could do that."

Owen stared at her. "You," he said flatly, "are a walking medical miracle."

She grinned at him, showing the gap between her teeth. "Faerie."

"It's taken root," said Suzie disbelievingly. Everyone turned to see what she was talking about. She was standing over the body of the Plasmavore. He lay on his back in a puddle of blood, eyes staring glassily at nothing. Gwen's sharpened stick protruded from his chest, a clump of new green leaves blossoming at its tip. And sure enough, there were little tendrils of roots spreading out from beneath the body.

"Ah," said Gwen. "Oops." She rubbed the side of her neck sheepishly. "I said you needed some plants down here, didn't I?"

"You did," agreed Jack. "But I'd prefer they came without dead Plasmavores attached, if you don't mind."

"Fair point," Gwen acknowledged. She went over to the stick, Suzie edging away from her. "You need to let go," she informed the stick. "This isn't the right place to take root." She grabbed it and gave it a tug. It didn't budge. She scowled at it. "Listen, I don't care how good a fertiliser this fellow would make; he's going to smell awful before long, so he can't stay here. You've got to let go." Another tug. No give. Gwen glared. "If you don't let go, we're going to have to get out the garden shears," she warned.

This time, when she tugged, the stick came loose with an unpleasant squelchy sound, trailing bloody roots behind it. "Thank you," said Gwen. Then she turned to find all of Torchwood gaping at her. "What?" She looked from one of them to the next. "Haven't you ever heard that plants like it when you talk to them?"

"Oh, sure," said Owen dryly. "Talking _to_ them, fine. It's the getting a response that's kinda creepy."

Gwen opened her mouth to respond to him, then noticed that the roots of her stick were reaching down toward the ground and trying to take hold. She held it higher. "Hey, no! What are you doing? We're _underground_. There isn't enough light down here for you to grow." The little tendrils just stretched out further, dripping blood and craning to reach the floor. Gwen rolled her eyes and sighed.

She turned, seized the corpse by its ankles and, with remarkable strength, hauled it a few feet away, leaving a great smear of blood. This revealed the spot where the stick had originally rooted itself, where it had broken the tile floor. 

"What are you doing?" asked Jack warily.

"Giving the little idiot what it wants," she said, plunking it back in its crack, where it at once dug in its roots and settled with a contented rustle of leaves. She shook her head at it and turned to Jack. "Don't worry about it. With no sun or soil down here, it should be dead within a week. Then you can just pull it out and burn it.

"Now!" She twirled in a circle and addressed the room at large. "The danger's passed, and I could do with some fresh air. See you around!" And she turned toward the lift to the Plass.

"Wait!" called Jack, taking a few steps forward. Gwen turned. Jack's stare was hard. "I know how seriously faeries take debts. What do we owe you for this?"

She blinked, as if she hadn't even considered it. "Oh, I don't know. Bit of help next time things get hairy would be fine." She grinned. "I'm not about to demand anybody's firstborn, you silly man. Now if you don't mind, there's a rooftop calling my name." She smiled, waved, and was gone.

***

Gwen sat on the roof of the Millennium Centre, staring up at the stars and enjoying the feel of the wind on her skin. She would have preferred someplace green, but she had a feeling a certain captain was going to come looking for her before long. She'd dropped him a clue before she left, and now she was giving him a chance to find her.

Sure enough, she hadn't even been there half an hour when she heard someone climbing out the hatch onto the roof and coming up cautiously behind her. Gwen looked round, and there he was, watching her with different eyes than he'd ever had for her before. Maybe he was really seeing _her_ now, rather than just what she was.

Gwen smiled at him to let him know he was welcome, and she patted the spot beside her. He came without hesitation and sat. They watched the stars together for a few minutes before he spoke.

"I wanted to thank you," he told her quietly. "We would have lost Ianto without you, and that's not even touching on the rest of it."

Gwen gave him an awkward half-smile and shrugged. "I've made it my duty to protect the people of this world. I was only doing my job."

Jack tilted his head and gave her a long, evaluating look. "I've never heard of any of your kind taking much interest welfare of humans."

Gwen leaned her elbows on her knees and wrapped her hands around her upper arms. "I didn't, not for a long time. But then I met a man called the Doctor."

She heard Jack's sharp intake of breath. His attention suddenly had all the intensity of a laser. _"You know the Doctor?"_

She turned to look at him, startled. "Well, sort of. I met him once … gosh, a hundred and fifty years ago, now." She stared into the distance, into memory, a day long past still dancing sharply before her eyes. "I helped him and his friend Rose save the world — or rather, they convinced me to save it, showed me that I could, and should, even if it cost me my life." She took a deep breath. "In the end it didn't, but … it changed the way I saw … everything. Completely." She cocked her head inquisitively. "What about you?"

Jack shook his head and gave a breathy chuckle. "Much the same story. I used to travel with him and Rose. The Doctor turned me into the man I am today, taught me to take a stand and try to help rather than let myself be a coward. I've been trying to live up to his example ever since."

"I suppose that's me, too, in a way," said Gwen slowly. "I started travelling, after I met him — exploring the world, getting to know all the human cultures, and helping wherever I could… In the end, though, Wales called me home. And I thought that the best place to be was Cardiff, keeping an eye on the Rift and doing what I could to deal with what comes through it."

Jack cocked a thoughtful eyebrow. "Then we have a common goal." He stared out at the horizon for a while, and then asked abruptly, "Would you consider taking a job at Torchwood?"

Gwen stared in astonishment. "Work for Torchwood?"

"Yeah. You'd be doing what you're doing anyway, but you'd have access to all our equipment, and you'd get paid for it. And it's always good to have backup."

She considered silently for a minute. "It's been a long time since I worked a mortal job — a human job. I'm not sure I'd know what to do. But…" The possibilities expanded in her mind. "It would make living in the human world easier, having money. I'm used to having to hunt, steal, or scavenge for a lot of my food." She tilted her head. "Would I have to live indoors — buy a house or some such?"

"Not if you don't want to," said Jack. "Where do you live now?"

She shrugged. "Here and there. I sleep in forests and parks — anywhere there are trees."

"You smell good for someone who sleeps rough," remarked Jack.

Gwen snorted. "I take hygiene seriously, thank you. Even if I have to wash in fountains or the bay, or break into empty houses. I always have soap with me."

"Well, I think we can do better than that for you," he said with a grin. "You don't have to live indoors if you don't want to, but we can give you access to a shower and hot water whenever you want it."

That was pretty tempting. Hot water didn't matter to her; cold didn't bother faeries. But being able to wash whenever she wanted, without having to find an unobserved place or put up with less-than-clean water… And having money so that she wouldn't have to spend a good portion of her day seeking out food… 

"I'll do it."

***

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Torchwood ended up with a whopping great tree growing in the middle of their underground base. Owen always referred to it as "the Vampire Tree" and claimed that it had absorbed the life force of its victim. Gwen told him not to be silly, but seemed just as baffled by its survival as the rest of them. Except Jack, that is, who had caught Ianto piling up garden soil around the base of the stick and watering it a few times a week.

"It's like she says, sir," Ianto said placidly. "Plants in the workplace are good for mental health."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I totally didn't intend the tree. Gwen originally had a big dagger. But then I got this image of the dead Plasmavore with a sapling growing up through his chest, and it was too perfect.
> 
> Also, I hope it's clear that the reason the team managed to find the Plasmavores on the CCTV system is that the Plasmavores deliberately turned off their perception filters to lure Torchwood out.
> 
> I'm intending to keep posting every Sunday ... probably have a few one-shots in this series before the next larger story.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pretty sure I remember from "They Keep Killing Suzie" that Torchwood has an open-air parking lot, but it just made more sense to me if they had an underground garage. I mean, they've got an ENTIRE, MASSIVE UNDERGROUND BASE. But they park their cars out where anyone could get at them? So I gave them a garage.
> 
> My logic is sound.


End file.
